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Adam Holisky had a great idea!

I was walking with Cassie and had this great idea for an engineering pet that allowed you to Transmogrify your items on the go.

As I explained my idea and how fun it would be to Cassie, she informed me that she’d just read something like that on WoW Insider. And the version she read was well-reasoned and made a great deal of sense, as opposed to my half an idea vision of what would be cool about it that hadn’t been thought all the way through yet.

Oh.

Well, fine.

I still like the idea, because it makes so much sense to the profession.

But she was right. What I started with was a vision of “How cool would this be” and followed it back to how we could get one.

See, here was what I was thinking. Keep in mind, this is purely a “How freaking cool would this be” vision, not a completely thought out “how would I code this into the game so people couldn’t exploit/cheat/kill others/ruin the game with it” thing.

My vision was simple. Bring back profession quest chains to get cool recipes.

In this case, instead of the Wrath of the Lich King Jeeves model, where you had to go farm droids until the Jeeves pattern dropped, you would actually have a quest available from the Transmogrification vendor, who in Stormwind is Warpweaver Hashom.

The quest would be to go and perform some services for this individual, services of a max engineering nature. And I’m not talking about “go and craft me 15 crysteel tubes”, I’m talking about go into hazardous areas and obtain hard to find ingredients that the Warpweaver requires for his services.

This could be as simple as going to various zones and farming drops from mobs that you have to combine, or giving you an item that, when you kill certain mobs, drains essence from them that goes into your inventory. The kind of thing we have certainly seen implemented in game before.

The idea here, though, is that you do a bunch of favors for this guy, and in exchange, at the end of it he gives you access to a recipe that would allow you to spend the money and time and crafting mats to make yourself a transdimensional beacon that would call him. If you activate it, a portal would appear and the Warpweaver would walk through, and would be willing to do this because, although a mercenary at heart, he owes you one. Plus, when you transmog stuff, you still have to pay him. So, it makes sense to me that he would as a reward give YOU a recipe, that YOU would do all the work to create the item from the recipe, and in the end it gives you an item that can call him and he has the choice of ignoring your call, or stepping through, and if he does step through… in the end, you are giving him even more money.

So it is a quest chain, a gold sink, a time sink, it’s tied into your profession, and in the end you have an item that you can use to summon the transmog vendor.

Here is where the fun bit comes in.

I personally miss the days of misfiring Engineering items. I always thought that was hilarious, and a prime reason I enjoyed having so many Engineering characters.

Sine we are talking about an item that would be sending a beacon through transimensional time and space, calling for the Warpweaver… how fun would it be if there was a small chance that, instead of the vendor responding, instead a tentacled horror tried to come in through the portal? Just lots of tentacles coming in, and you had to kill them all to reset the portal for the vendor to appear?

I can see it now… “Hold on a second, let me call for Hashom… WHOOPS!” *whack whack whack* “No problem, happens every once in a while, think I’ve got a bad dilithium crystal in the frequency pack, not to worry, we’ll soon have this all sorted out. “*whack whack*.

“There! Now let’s try that again, shall we?”

I do miss those chances of amusing failure… I used to take pride in my parachute skills whenever the teleporter to Tanaris malfunctioned… and I knew where I would land by heart.

Adam Holisky did a better job of thinking it through, but I still like my vision of it in action. 🙂

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10 thoughts on “Adam Holisky had a great idea!”

I thought the backfire would be that you would end up wearing a fashion horror transmog instead of the outfit you wanted, and would get a debuff preventing you from changing the transmog for 1 hour. Lol.

Portable forges actually existed in RL, so there’s no real reason a blacksmith shouldn’t be able to carry one around. I have more than a hundred different mounts, including a dozen dragons, why can’t my hunter carry an iron bowl with a hand cranked blower and some coal?

Most of my engineering failures are pretty meh… but a friend asked me what the net thrower did, so I started a duel and he was running around like a fool so he could see it land on him… but it ran me forward next to him and netted both of us. “Uh, hi.”

I remember being a fresh-faced, doe-eyed paladin in early BC smelting ore at the forge in Hammerfall in Arathi Highlands. Still very new to the game, somewhere in my mid 30’s just happily churning out metal bars and only half payin attention to the game. Next to me was a 70 orc warrior wordlessly crafting stuff. I was still so new in fact that ANY 70 was automatically a veritable god at the game, a true Hero and idol that inspired awe and wonder in my young heart.

Each of us minding our own business watching castbars play out over and over and over when out of nowhere KABOOM! ORC EXPLODES! I had no idea what happened. I swiveled my camera around, looking for some hidden enemy player or monster powerful enough do destroy a mighty 70 in one hit! Panic set in as nothing was immediately apparent, no guards went on alert, no red nametag to be seen or monster to blot out the sun. A second later, I got a whisper from the player asking for a rez.

“what the hell WAS that”?
“Goblin dynomite”

I didn’t respond other than to rez. It was a very long time before I found out what that was, the way he said it was so matter of fact that I didn’t want to sound like the ignorant noob I was. I still laugh thinking about the peaceful serenity of 2 people just crafting their wares out in picturesque Arathi and a suddenly explosive orc, followed by a mighty 70 sheepishly asking a lowly lowbie like me for a rez.

I’m having trouble remembering any specific failures, but I do have fond memories of the sudden realization that my force reactive disk had zapped its last zap and now I needed to dig out another shield. Thankfully, I carried at least four shields at all times. Of course a death ray backfire could be wonderful fun as well. On the positive side, in one particular world PvP fight a rocket boot backfire launched me into the air, out of combat, out of sight, and out of mind. I corrected that situation.